the pink panther exclusive
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the pink panther exclusive
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Full Production Notes: Shooting in New York and Paris
 Levy’s Pink Panther marks the first time that Inspector Clouseau has visited New York City, which offered some potentially hilarious fish-out-of-water moments in locations such as Times Square, Fifth Avenue and the stately Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.It also meant that some of Kilvert’s Paris and Italy interiors were actually in Manhattan, meaning she had to seamlessly blend the faux Paris with the real one. For example, New York’s famed Beaux-Arts Public Library, with its imposing marble archways and elaborate murals, served as some of the interiors for Paris’ Palais de Justice, where Dreyfus was headquartered. That and the interiors of his office, built at the Kaufman-Astoria studios, had to connect to Paris’ 700-yearold Sorbonne University, which served as the Palais de Justice exterior and ballroom.
The ballroom itself proved to be an exciting challenge for Kilvert, especially since she had to supervise its design and construction in Paris while working in New York. During filming, Kilvert oversaw design crews in three separate countries simultaneously, to make sure that while the shooting crew was on the sets and streets of New York, their counterparts were preparing to shoot in Paris and Prague. “I love working in New York and I knew we’d shoot a majority of the movie there. But I also love Paris and speaking French (Kilvert is fluent), so that excited me as well,” she says. “But I did have terminal jet lag. It was interesting having crews working in different countries because they do things slightly differently. For example, I had to find out who in France actually deals with small props — the set decorator or the on-set prop man? Is there an on-set painter? Little things like that become huge, especially with so much detail work in the set. So it helped enormously that I spoke French.”
The detail requirements for the ballroom scene, Kilvert adds, were particularly crucial. “The ballroom scene is the climax of the movie, where all the cat-andmouse shenanigans come to an exciting and hilarious close. To accommodate the frantic activity involved when Clouseau closes in on the murderer and the thief, we need several specifics. Most importantly, we had to be able to look down from the ceiling onto a stage where Beyoncé was singing. The need to have a dramatic setting is what led us to the Sorbonne.”
The Sorbonne, the fabled French University originally founded in the 13th century, has a commanding beauty with ornately filigreed ceilings and marble hallways — but it would never be confused with a glitzy ballroom.
“Stylistically, it was not where we were at,” says Kilvert, “even if it delivered architecturally. So, we had to dress it to make it seem more presidential and glittery. We jazzed it up with chandeliers and tapestries and flowers. We laid about 400 meters of red carpet and filled it with hundreds of extras dressed in fancy gowns and tuxedos. It looked glamorous and silly — which was what we wanted.”
The ballroom sequence also required a special bit of set design that showcased Clouseau’s inventive use of camouflage. “Let’s just say we needed to dress a wall panel with a small pattern that wasn’t too aggressive and another adjacent one with a bigger pattern, which ended up resembling marble. It was an aesthetic challenge but it worked brilliantly for the gag Steve came up with and it was very, very funny,” Kilvert says.
The Pink Panther is Levy’s fourth collaboration with director of photography Jonathan Brown, who describes the look of the cinematography as a combination “international caper film and comedy. What I mean is that typically, comedies have a higher key, they are lit brighter than dramas. We tried to inject more moody, dramatic lighting. We kept the frame wide so that Steve could still have room to do physical comedy, but we often treated it as though it were an adventure film as well as a comedy,” he says.
Since many of Kilvert’s sets were bathed in neutral or dark tones, in keeping with the look of Paris interiors and the beautiful golden stone on most of the city’s facades, much of the film’s color came from Brown’s choice of lights and gels. In keeping with the gentler version of reality Levy wanted for Clouseau’s world, most of the gels were soft and warm tones. “Jonathan and I ultimately landed on the idea that the quality of light should always be soft — never the harsh, cold glare of natural light,” says Levy. “If it was natural light through a window, it was muted by sheers. There was a slight saturation of yellows, oranges, ochre golds, so that the light and tone of the cinematography is always a little more beautiful and softer than real life.”
Levy and Brown primarily relied on classic shots that they occasionally punctuated with the oddball angle, according to the director. “What I’ve found is that if the actors and the writing are good, sometimes the best and smartest thing a director can do is get out of the way,” he says. “So, occasionally, Jonathan and I used a shot that was self-referential but more often than not, we let Steve andthe screenplay do the heavy lifting. Now, having said that, the screenplay always gives hints about the visual style and this one was idiosyncratic and quirky. So we found sometimes that the compositions were strikingly symmetrical. These frames are usually a little too odd for my tastes, but keying off of the quirky screenwriting, a certain idiosyncrasy in the composition was appropriate. It was a slightly less conventional approach to composition than I’ve ever used before. There are many shots in which we see Clouseau dead center though a wideangle lens. Elsewhere in the film, two-thirds of the compositions are empty and Clouseau is just on the edge of frame. We consciously unbalanced the composition because Clouseau is an absurdist character and the framing was tinged with that.”
Simonds adds that the film also has a carefully considered use of negative space. “We paid real attention to depth of field. If there was action in the foreground, some part of the composition allowed the frame to breathe. It’s important to allow the audience that breathing room,” he says.
Like Kilvert, Brown also worked with an international camera crew but couldn’t work with each new crew much in advance of filming in places like Paris and Prague. However, he did take a select few crew members with him and, by the end, wound up with a polyglot crew of Americans, French and Czech camera men and women, electricians and grips.
“The international crew aspect of the job and the different styles of working interested me very much,” says Brown. “It was a strange mélange of people and personalities, all with set ways of doing things. A large part of my job is navigating the delicate balance of creativity, corporate efficiency and harnessing or creating enthusiasm among the crew. Given that I was working with such a diverse group of people, that became an even greater part of my work. We were very lucky to put together a great bunch of people in all countries. They really rose to the occasion.”
Each new crew had to adapt to Levy’s high energy and tempo. Fortunately, after having worked with the director on four films, Brown knew how to manage these demands efficiently, artistically and productively. “Shawn likes to harness the energy that comes from controlled chaos,” observes Brown. Maintaining the pace meant doing what we would normally have had 70 days to do in only 49 days. In many ways, that was the toughest aspect of the job. It was only through intense location scouting and thorough shot listing, including detailed storyboards, that we were able to put together precise and flexible pre-rigs. That really was the key to having enough time on any given day to capture all the comedy performances, gags and stunts as well as all the inserts. In the end, all that preparation allowed Shawn to have more time with the actors and still get all our shots.”
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